right between the scapulae, back of the heart

I have had A Day.

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First things first: wow was that presale a total clusterfuck. I was kind of shaking after.

On the bright side, I did get tickets for 3 of the 5 shows I wanted: Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. (The D.C. presale sold out before I even made it over to that tab following the Ticketmaster/Live Nation failures. Better luck Saturday, especially since I've been appointed head of a ticket-buying cabal. And I was iffy on NJ but it looks like enough people are going that I can find a ride.)

Now I shall sum up my vacation! Only about two weeks late, ooops. Halloween was Rocky Horror, and then I spent Monday and Tuesday morning catching up on the internet while Cory was at work. Starting on Wednesday, I called Ellen to pick me up for hanging out, thrift shopping, visiting Adam Kemp's studio/gallery, etc. We had dinner with Ellen and Greg on Wednesday. On Thursday, we went to a lecture given by one of Greg's colleagues, then to a gallery opening where we met up with Ellen's friends Brian and Jerry, and then pizza.

On the subject of Grand Forks: I'm considering an extended visit this summer. Maybe in May, when I can't really go to New Orleans yet. I figure it would be an actual vacation - normally, when I travel, it's to do stuff (and to see people, but then I do stuff with those people!). And Grand Forks is tranquil, and this is going to make me sound kind of pretentious but I want to ~~focus on my art~~ and that seems like a really great place to do it.

There are a few problems with this plan, though:

I should probably get a fucking job, seriously.

I am thinking 2-3 weeks, which seems like kind of a long time to make anyone except my parents put up with me as a houseguest. In essence: I wanna stay with my boyfriend! But his roommates will probably get sick of me, and their apartment (complete with dog who steals everything ever) is not ideal ~~art~~ surroundings. Whereas Ellen and Greg would be thrilled to have me and their house is awesome and they probably would not even care if Cory basically moved in while I was there. But neither of the bedrooms really works for that last part: the upstairs one has a twin bed and the downstairs one used to be Ellie's room (not an issue for me, because it was "my" room first, when I went to the teen writers camp at UND, but it really bothers Cory).

Mailing my own art supplies to myself could get expensive/absurd. Whittling them down could just get absurd.

But, it is an idea, anyway.

Now for work and real life and grown-up shit!

We're apparently working on some kind of giant digital repository infrastructure (and by "we," I mean "my school/employer/heck they might actually literally own my soul at this point"). The guy in charge of that gave a presentation at the staff meeting and it was kind of nerdgasmic. And! The archives is first in line to start using it! Sadly I doubt the vaporware will condense into anything before I am gone; the project really does have just this one guy working on it.

Scanning documents (what I've been doing lately) is kind of tedious. The scanning doesn't take more than token concentration, whereas scanning images often requires that various settings be changed between every single image. Making pdfs and OCR are both time-consuming and slow the computer to a crawl. I had a 100+ page document last week and a 200+ page document this week. Fortunately I have discovered the trick of breaking giant documents into multiple pdfs and then merging those.

My Friday kind of sucked. It started off fine - documents are boring but whatever, it can't be all awesome all the time. And then the Orange Line fell over and died! I got home an hour later than usual only to discover that someone left a valve on the heater open and it overflowed and flooded the basement. Furthermore, the house is freezing because the heater doesn't operate when it's overflowing. *gurgle* Drowning my sorrows (heh, drowning) in glittery lip gloss and my eyeshadow collection.

Giant digital repository infrastructure, eh? We're just about to start doing the heavy lifting on ours, using Fedora Commons. It'll replace the old proprietary system in the archives first...and hopefully it'll eventually tie together everything in the OPAC, journals, in-house electronic publishing, and so on...

We eventually want to roll it out to literally every person in the university, not just as a place to look at stuff but as a place to put their own stuff. o_O I'm sure that will take forever, though, so the first stuff to go in will be stuff that can be imported - I think IRis gets rolled into the digital repository around the same time as the archives, and it'll go from there.

We are also using Fedora. We're all looking forward to it because our current system for digital collections kind of sucks, but it also kind of sucks that this is the second time we've switched within the past few years (I think the last switchover was not long before I started working here, just over 3 years ago).

Yes, but it feels rather stupid to want a retreat of sorts when I'm in the process of outfitting my dining room with, like, a jeweler's torch. I'm not going to find a better setup; it's all about the ambiance. Okay, and the release from normal responsibilities and habits. :)